GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN same prison cell, where they vegetate in hos- tile silence. Everything changes when a Ii t- tIe, life-loving Italian, Roberto (Roberto Benigni), is put in with them; the three become pals, grinning and talking together And, eventually, Roberto devises an escape plan. Jarmusch's passive style has its wit, but the style is deadening here until he brings in Roberto-a character out of folk humor. With Ellen Barkin, Billie Neal, Nicoletta Braschi, Rockets Redglare, and Vernel Bag- nens (10/20/86) (Quad Cinema. . . . (]I Olym- pia Quad Evenings only.) THE GOLD RUSH (1925)-He enters "pursued by a bear" - the man who for generations of filmgoers has been the embodiment of "the little fellow": humanity. In this extraordinari- ly sweet and graceful comedy, Chaplin is the weak and helpless perfect gentleman in the Klondike world of bears and brutes; yet his gallantrv wins him the gold and the girl, too. In 1958, an internationdl jury at Brussels selected this work as the second-greatest film of all time (after ('Potemkin"). With Mack Swain as Big Jim, and with Georgia Hale, Tom Murray, and Henry Bergman. Produced, written, and directed by Chaplin. Silent; Chaplin later added music and a narration. (Thalia SoHo; Jan. 15.) HEARTBREAK RIDGE-It's well known that many people have strong feelings about anal inter- course but it's doubtful if a whole movie had ever been devoted to the expression of those feelings until this one. Clint Eastwood, who dIrected, plays (so to speak) a Medal of Hon- or winner from the Korean War and a deco- rated Vietnam vet-a Marine gunnery ser- geant whose abhorrence of being put in a passive sexual position seems to be what makes him super-tough and manly. The ma- rines in his platoon stand waiting while Old Gunny wraps his jowls around witless scur- rilous insults, all involving what he's going to shove up their orifices. This should be the portrait of a pathetic vulgarian militarist with terrible anal-aggressive problems, but Eastwood presents him as a great fighting man, a relic of a time when men were men And, in the last half hour, the film pre ents proof of what Gunny's training does for hIS platoon: it celebrates Grenada as a victory that evens the score, after a tie in Korea and a loss in Vietnam This movie is offensive on just dbout every level Written by James Carabatsos; with Marsha Mason, Mario Van Peebles, Everett McGill, Moses Gunn, Eileen Heckart, Bo Svenson, Boyd Gaines, and Arlen Dean Snyder (12/29/86) (23rd St. West Triplex. . (]I Manhattan, R K.O 86th St. Twin, and R.K.O Warner Twin; through Jan. 8 ) THE HOMECOMING (1973)-When this Harold Pinter play is presented on the stage, the ten- sions bounce around, and one can respond to the actors' relish in their roles, but on the screen the material is so lethally set that Pinter sounds Pinteresque Michael Jayston, smiling a tiny, tight smIle, plays the philos- ophy professor who, accompanied by his wife, Ruth (VivIen Merchant), returns from Amer- ica to visit his Cockney family. The sugges- tiveness of the play remains, along with some of its charge, and so does Pinter's idiom, with its wit, though in the movie the language sounds crisped-overcalibrated With Paul Rogers, Cyril Cusack, Idn Holm, and Terence Rigby They are all playing so high they can- cel out each other's performances Directed by Peter Hall (Theatre 80 St. Marks; Jan 15 ) THE LEOPARD (1963)-lt's magnificent-a sweeping popular epic, wi th obvious similari- tIes to "Gone with the Wind," and with an almost Chekhovian sensibility. It has a hero on a grand scale-Don Fabrizio, Prince of Salina, played superlatively by Burt Lancas- ter, who modelled his performance on the nobleman director Luchino Visconti The film IS set In the eIghteen-sixties, when Italy was in the middle of a revolution, but it's essen- tially about the Pnnce himself-the aging Leopdrd-and how he reacts to the social changes WIth Alain Delon, Claudia Car- dInale, Paolo Stoppa, and Rina Morelli In Italian; three hours and five minutes (Public Theatre; through Jan 15.) LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS-With Rick Moranis, El- len Greene, dnd Vincent Gardenia, directed by Frank Oz. (Reviewed in this issue ) (New Gramercy, Beekman, Loews 84th Street Six- plex, and Criterion Center) MEN.. . -When the handsome, self-centered Julius (Heiner Lauterbach), a Munich adver- tising executive, discovers that his wife (Ul- rike Kriener) has been having an affair with the oafish Stefan (Uwe Ochsenknecht), a long- haired bohemian, he wants to know what Stefan's attraction is, so he a sumes a false name and moves in with him. J uli us takes some kind of revenge by turning Stefan into an orderly bourgeois with a regular job; while that happens, whimsical gags are tossed to- gether with a jocular feminist exposé of men's attitudes toward women. The picture is harmless and insipid, in the mode of French farces such as "Cousin, Cousine;" it sags in the middle and then collapses in an absurdist ending. Written and directed by Doris Dórrie In German. (9/8/86) (Lincoln Plaza.) MÉNAGE- The first half hour of this sex farce is wonderfully brisk and slam-bang provoca- tive: the writer-director Bertrand Blier violates old formulas and experiments with ideas of subversion and chaos Gérard Depar- dieu is the burglar who, at night in a café, overhears the callous bitchy wife, Miou- Miou, bawling out her loving husband, Mi- chel Blanc, because he can't make enough money to please her Enamored of the mousy husband, Depardieu takes the two along on his surreally easy burglaries, waiting for his chance to bed the man. By the time that Miou-Miou has been sold to a pimp and the two men are in drag, working as prostitutes, Blier is trying so hard to be outrageous that he loses the beat; the outrageousness comes to seem another kind of bondage to formula. In French. (Cinema Studio.) METROPOLIS (1926)-FrÜz Lang's prophetic city of the twenty-first century (suggested by his first view of New York) has two levels: one for the rich and pleasure-loving, the other- labyrinthine, underground-for the slave workers who tend the machines. The indus- trialist tyrant who runs Metropolis plots to incite riots so that he can crush the workers' rebelliousness His son has gone down to the workers and fallen in love with the saintly firebrand Maria (Brigitte Helm) The tyrant plots with an inventor, Rotwang, who, in a phenomenal science-fiction laboratory se- quence, creates a steel double for Maria-the false Maria, who leads the masses to revolt. But the destruction gets out of hand and all of Metropolis would be destroyed were it not for the final allidnce of the industrialist, his son, the true Maria, and the workers One of the last examples of the imaginative-but of- ten monstrous-grandeur of the Golden Pe- riod of German film, "Metropolis" is a won- derful, stupefying folly. With Alfred Abel, Gustav Frölich, Rudolf Klein-Rogge, Fritz Rasp, and Heinrich George. Note: The ver- sion showing now was reconstructed by Gior- gio Moroder, with tinting that attempts to follow Lang's original specifications, and with a modern pop score. (Thalia, Jan. 16-17.) MONA LIsA-Directed by the Irish novelist turned movie maker Neil Jordan, the whole movie has some of the potency of cheap mu- sic that's represented hy the title song (in Nat King Cole's 1950 recording). The short, chunky Bob Hoskins is tremendous as a one- time petty crook, just emerged from prison; given the Job of chauffeuring a b1ack call girl (Cathy Tyson) on her nightly rounds, he falls in love with her. She sets him to searching for a friend she's worried about-a blond fifteen- year-old heroin addict As he makes his way through the strip joints and whores' hang- outs, he's sickened by the way the gIrls are mIstreated, and he sees that his old hoss (Mi- chael Caine) i in the rotten thick of it. Jor- dan shows a gift for making the emotional atmosphere visual, and vice versa. And the way he uses baroque touches and the clichés of old thrillers they become part of a :fluid, enjoyable texture With Robbie Coltrane, Clarke Peters, and Zoe Nathenson Script by Jordan and David Leland (6/16/86) (Film Forum.) THE MORNING AFTER-Jane Fonda gives a raucous-voiced, down-in-the-dirty perfor- mance that has some of the charge of her Bree in "Klute," back in 1971. As Alex, a former screen actress whose career blew up in scandal, she still has her face and her figure but she has a hard, tortured look under her :fluffy blond hair, and she drinks so much she has blackouts (Fonda has said that she modelled the character on the starlet Gail Russell, who, at thirty-six, was found dead in 17 Some Of Our Expeditions Are For The Birds. .... J. . /. d- jO' i Þ<'" Penguins are just part of the allure of our Antarctica expedition cruises You'll also observe vast rookenes of seals. Ice-riddled inlets and bays sur- rounded by sheer cliffs and immense glaciers. And constant surprises around every turn, as the wind and waves carve the ice into myriad dazzlIng white-blue images. All expeditions take place on the World Discoverer and Society Explorer, both world-renowned 5-star luxury expedition ships. Groups are always small and intimate. Expert naturalists and ornithologists will be on board Departures: November-January. Programs range from 15-35 days. Wnte or call 1-800-426-7794. ----------- Antarctica SOCIETY EXPEDITIONS CRUISES DEPT.NY1 SOCIETY EXPEDITIONS BUILDING 3131 ELLIOTT AVE., SUITE 700 SEATTLE, WA 98121 I'm interested in taking an expedition cruise in 1987 _, 1988 _, 1989 _. Please send infonnation on programs checked. NAME ADDRESS CITY STATE ZIP Expedition Cruises: 0 Antarctica; 0 Aleutian Islands & Alaska; 0 Amazon; 0 Baja; 0 Bali to Burma; o Canadian Fjords; 0 Greenland/Iceland; 0 Indonesia; o Korea & Japan; 0 Lost Islands of the Pacific; o Micronesia; 0 Oriental Passage. Private Trains: o Imperial Peking Express; 0 Orient Express; 0 Pans to Peking Express; 0 Trans-Siberian Special Cultural EXl!editions: 0 Burma/Thailand; 0 China/Tibet; o Galapagos Islands; 0 Gourmet Adventures; o Project Space Voyage. ,":.,1 Society itirns To the endS of the earth. And beyond. Ships' registry: Liberia and the Bahamas